Abstract

this article examines the path that leads girolamo cardano to write and publish the De secretis and it discusses some philosophical issues that emerge in this work, such as the nature of the wise-man and the question of demons. this historical analysis allows to consider the book related to the alchemy and natural philosophy of the renaissance. especially, this article regards as decisive the existence of a dialectical relationship between cardano and conrad gesner : in the Thesaurus Euonymi Philiatrii the Swiss naturalist cites alchemical ideas of the De subtilitate, in the De rerum varietate cardano reports and compares practices of distillation extracted from the Thesaurus of gesner. these complex relationships return in the De secretis where the only secret ‘revealed’ is the recipe, obtained with distilled water, for the care of the calculi. lastly the article compares the De secretis with the renaissance books of secrets. the work of cardano can not be included in this literature: the esoteric nature of secret and the fact that only the wise-man can learn the secrets are elements that differentiate cardano from the renaissance authors of libri secretorum